The silence which followed Frank's story was broken after several seconds, when Gill commented, "That seems to settle any doubts about the ring's great age and squarely puts the question we've been dodging."
"Which is?" asked Alicia.
"What," said Gill slowly and clearly, "was a metal ring doing in the stone age. Not in the transition to the bronze age. Not 'nearly' the bronze age, but far back. Well before anything else metal was known."
"You know," said Alicia, "For a couple of years now I've been worrying about that transition to the bronze age, not that it's entirely relevant."
"Yeah?" Frank prompted her.
"Well, Bronze is mostly ninety per cent copper and ten percent tin to help it keep an edge better," said Alicia.
"So?"
"There has to have been a long period when copper was used on its own. before anyone started experimenting with alloys," said Alicia.
Gill couldn't see what Alicia was driving at. "Perhaps there was some overlap," she said.
Steve, on the other hand, saw the point straight away. "So some stone age bloke thought 'I'll melt some of this rock and some of that rock and use the stuff I get from it to make a sword'?" he asked.
"Exactly," said Alicia. "Of course there would be overlap - there are still a few stone age peoples around today. What I meant is that there isn't room in the accepted chronology of human history for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of copper age.
"But," protested Gill, "I didn't know what the ring was made of or, at least, the person I was in the stone age didn't know." She turned to Frank. "And I'll bet you didn't know either."
"No. Nor I did," said Frank. "Whoever it was telling the story."
"You were a woman," said Steve, rather obviously.
"Quite a ruthless one," added Gill, equally obviously.
"Survival of the fittest," remarked Alicia, "They were pretty ruthless times."
"Ah!" protested Gill, "but you'd expect a woman to care what happened to her offspring, wouldn't you? That woman more or less allowed her own daughter to be raped."
"Without condoning rape to-day, I don't think she saw it that way at all," said Alicia. "What she did was use her daughter's sexuality to bait a trap for everybody's good as she saw it, and for her own ambitions too."
"The end justifies the means?" asked Gill, almost derisively. "Anyway you're dodging the really mystifying question."
Alicia sighed. "That's the one question mark which puts everything in all the stories in doubt. Chronology tells us for certain that the ring could not possibly have been handed down from the past." She paused, looking both puzzled and frustrated.
"All right," she continued, "Where did it come from and how did it get where it was? What do you think Frank?"
Apart from his one confused remark, Frank hadn't said anything and looked lost in thought. His answer, when it came, suggested that he had been reflecting rather than listening.
"I said, 'What do you think, Frank?'"
"It's the Mayan problem only more so," he answered obscurely.
"What do you mean?" asked Alicia.
"If you stargaze without instruments you've got to do it hundreds, perhaps thousands of years to get the longer cycles right and even eclipses come only once or twice in a lifetime. To-day we live much longer but we still need to travel long distances to observe them with any regularity. Predicting them requires a high degree of accuracy, especially if you think the sun revolves round the earth and don't realise an eclipse of the sun is caused by the moon."
"I've read that the Mayans spent a lot of time and effort on time and calendars," said Alicia.
"The Mayans didn't just spend a lot of time on time, they were obsessed by it. They could reckon the length of a solar year accurate to within an error of one day in six thousand years. That's more accurate than anyone else until this century. They could work out the length of a Venus year to within .08 of a day. They had a calendar year of 260 days divided into 10 months and in cycles of 20 years - that's more than eighteen thousand day and month combinations. They didn't, as far as we know, have any instruments to help them nor, as far as we know, did they have 'hours' or other subdivisions of the day. Remember too that we're talking about people who didn't invent the wheel and only just about reached the end of the stone age. But they did have a nought."
"A nought?" queried Steve, listening and thinking rather than talking.
"The Romans didn't have any concept of place in columns of numbers," explained Manjy. "If you wanted to add, say, three hundred and forty three, five hundred and fifty, forty and nine hundred and thirty eight, you couldn't put them under each other because you'd have a sum like this." and she wrote on the back of an envelope:
CCCXLIII
DL
XL
CMXXXIII
"So you see," she added, "when the Indians or the Arabsor whoever it was invented nine digits and a nought and the concept of place, it was a big step forward."
"You can say that again," remarked Frank.
"And the Mayans had that concept as well?" Alicia mused.
"Yeah, though they counted in twenties, so they had nineteen digits and a nought."
"They were really sold on measuring time, weren't they?" said Steve thoughtfully.
"You wouldn't believe how sold," Frank continued. "They went to the trouble of working out cycles going back four ... hundred ... million ... years. They carved calendars on the sides of pyramids and when some enterprising archaeologist stripped one of them off there was another pyramid of calendars underneath. And another under that."
"They were totally obsessed with time," said Gill. "I wonder why?"
"But the folks in my story knew a lot about the cyclic nature of time too."
"Cyclic?" queried Steve, still listening and thinking.
"Well I guess I should have said 'measurement of time' rather than time itself. The Mayans measured time because they believed everything that took place had happened before and that by detailing the past they could predict the future."
"Astrology?" asked Alicia.
"Yes and no," Frank answered. "Like the priest in my story. It wasn't just astrology, though that came into it. There were three other things in my story that put me in mind of the Mayans. The woman in my story twice mentioned losing a finger if anything happened to her daughter. The Maya had a custom which involved burying an adult finger with a child. Coincidentally, so did a lot of tribes of American Indians and now we have a similar custom mentioned in this story."
"Now that is odd," said Alicia, "Was this story set in central America do you think?"
"I wondered that, but I don't think so. It was warm but not hot and I seemed to be in the foothills of much older mountains."
Frank thought about it. "If it was the Americas at all it was somewhere like the southern Appalachians, but it felt closer to the sea than that. Where the terrain is right the climate is wrong. I'd say it was Europe somewhere. Maybe France."
Steve was thinking about a book he had read in the prison library. Gill was thinking about something else.
"The storyteller said that there was more sun and less rain further ... I think she meant 'further north'. What sort of weather had there been?" she asked.
"Funny you should ask. I think there had been a long period of cold, overcast weather. Not a long period as in several months, I'm talking about several centuries. Time out of mind."
"I was wondering how far we'd gone. Could this have been the end of the ice age?"
"I don't think so," said Frank, "I think we're talking about heavily overcast weather, not ice."
"It would have to be a slow warming to be the end of the ice age, I think." commented Alicia. "The glaciers came as far south as Southern Britain at their height, but they began to recede about twelve or fourteen thousand years ago."
"As a matter of interest," said Steve, "why wasn't there a warmer area in western Europe where the Gulf Stream warmed the land?"
"I've never really thought about it," Alicia frowned. "I suppose there is some explanation but, now you point it out, you'd expect the pattern of average temperatures to be the same then as now. Lower, not different"
"But they weren't, were they?" said Steve, "You could reasonably infer that the Gulf Stream didn't warm western Europe because the Gulf Stream was diverted by an area of land that existed then and doesn't exist now."
There was a longish silence broken by Frank. "It would have to be a pretty large chunk of land to deflect ocean currents."
Alicia changed the subject, just as Steve was beginning to be really interested in hearing Frank's further thoughts. "You said there a couple of other things in the story which put you in mind of the Mayans," she said, "What were they?"
"Names" said Frank, "Names were one thing. I'm not sure what the woman herself was called, I rather think she had the same name as the daughter."
"No. The mother was Itzapec the daughter was Mayapec," Alicia corrected.
" Anyway," Frank continued, "Po-atl sounds Central American, though it's more Aztec or Toltec than Mayan, but Itzapec is definitely Mayan. Chichin Itza was a huge Mayan centre with substantial remains to-day and PEC is a typically Mayan ending. And I hardly need mention Mayapec."
"We have enough anomalies already," observed Alicia with a sigh. "First there's a metal ring far back in the stone age, and we haven't even started to tackle that one. Second, there are memories of a time when agriculture was widespread, we didn't eat meat and didn't have human sacrifice. Thirdly there are Central American names in Europe, fourthly there's a trade in Kohl at least three thousand years BC and last of all there's Steve's question about the Gulf Stream. It's not part of the story but it's certainly an anomaly. That's a lot of problems, and yet the stories tend to 'hang together' with what we know in so many areas."
She pushed back her hair in a gesture that might have indicated either frustration or concentration.
"I think the other thing which put me in mind of the Mayans is possibly as important," said Frank. "These people couldn't write and kept records of their reckonings with knots in cord. Both are true of the early Mayans and the Incas. The later Mayans had a sort of hieroglyphic writing which they used to record calendar dates, and some possibly early documents have been preserved in museums. Apart from those records and some sacred documents destroyed by the priests with the Conquistadors, they seem not to have been used for much."
"It's perhaps no coincidence that the Mayan features came in the Mayan expert's story," said Alicia. "However, you may not have known that spirals carved in stone have presented European archaeologists with one of their biggest puzzles. Your story came up with a silly but plausible explanation of the source of them. Carving spirals was almost a habit and your story does explain where they came from. It's almost silly enough to be true."
"I didn't know anything about spirals, but I must say the whole experience is a lot more uncanny and unsettling than I expected. I see what Gill meant by not having deliberately invented anything. I'll tell you something else we should have guessed from Steve."
"What's that?" asked Gill.
"Something you kinda hinted at too, but I should've guessed. When you sit in on someone else's story, dream or whatever you call it, you get their story and that's all. I know things not included in the story. Like the weather further north - I think it was north she mentioned and the fact she ... I was wearing the amulet affair, but more as a personal ornament than anything. Steve could answer my questions from the point of view of the storyteller. Well I could do the same."
"I think I could too," agreed Gill.
"You know," said Manjy, "I think you all have past lives connected with the ring. You know things the people know but beyond the ring's experience."
"Too much of a coincidence to have three people at once connected with the ring," Alicia almost.
"I'll bet all five of us are connected with the ring," persisted Manjy. "Maybe even Alan as well."
Alicia was dismissive "That's an even bigger coincidence," she said. "I've heard of psychometry - reading the past of an object psychically, though I've always been sceptical before. I've heard stories of Tom Lethbridge dowsing for archeological answers with a pendulum and being right when more traditional colleagues were wrong, much to their annoyance. All the same, both are a lot easier to take than a belief in this all being a case of reincarnation."
"I wouldn't like to say whether psychometry or reincarnation is more likely", said Frank, "We ought to sleep on it before we decide but I must say, even though Alicia has logic on her side, I sure felt as if I was the woman in my story."
"You don't need to be the same sex in each incarnation," observed Manjy.
"It doesn't matter what sex you are when it comes to psychometry," argued Alicia.
"I think Frank's right. We should sleep on it," said Gill. "Perhaps if the rest of us try it on, someone will dream up an answer to the problem of a metal ring," she added.
Alicia yawned. "Mm. Maybe so," she said. "But nobody else is experimenting tonight."
She picked up the ring and stood up as the sound of the revellers returning from the pub drifted through the camp. She had the cabinet drawer open as the Alan entered the cabin.
"Can I have a quick word, Alicia?" he asked, and continued as she nodded, "Coming back from the pub to-night I saw your bird watcher watching the camp again."
"Bird watcher?" said Gill, "There was a bird watcher the first morning, before we started the dig proper."
"Oh, he's been seen around the dig a lot," Alan said.
"It may be nothing," said Alicia, "but I think we'll be more careful about locking up the place and on security generally."
"Do you want me to leave the generator on all night?" asked Steve.
"I think that would be going too far." answered Alicia. "I'll just be more security conscious is all for the moment. It's probably nothing."
"Just thought you'd like to know," said Alan and he left to join the volunteers again.
Alicia put the ring with some other exhibits in the cabinet. As an afterthought she crossed back to the desk, took up the box of computer disks and put it into one of drawers of the filing cabinet as well. She closed the drawers firmly, locked the whole cabinet and stuffed the key into her jeans pocket, commenting, "I think the risk is more imagined than real, but we can play safe by locking the cabinet and locking the cabin."
"I don't think would be thieves can count on anyone driving a fast getaway car on Hoy," remarked Steve.
Alicia looked startled for a moment and then laughed. "No," she said, "You couldn't drive far, but we'll just play safe."